Mantle Exposes More Low Level Features Than DX12, Shares Many Rendering Codes With PS4/Xbox One

Gamebase’s Bryan Tarlowski and Yoonjae Hwang talk about the benefits from AMD’s API.

Gamebase’s Gamebryo may be the most under-rated engine of all time, having found use in games like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Rift, Defense Grid: The Awakening and much more. GamingBolt had a chance to speak marketing director Bryan Tarlowski and Gamebryo lead engineer Yoonjae Hwang about the future of the engine.

We asked if AMD Mantle integration is on its way to Gamebryo or whether DX12 would be capable enough to provide low level access. “Our engineers have been testing Mantle. Mantle enables us to share many rendering code for Xbox One and PS4 and brings many benefits even on PC like explicit Multi-GPU management. Also Mantle exposes more low-level features than DX12 as extensions. Although we are going to inevitably support DX12 as well, Mantle is definitely the key technology that we’d like to adopt for consoles and high-end PCs.”

Despite the hype though, AMD Mantle has seen a fairly slow adoption rate. DirectX 12 will be out next year (it will reportedly ship with Windows 10) so there’s still plenty of time to speculate its impact on the industy. Thoughts on the power of Mantle? Let us know below.

DX12 is still in development, Mantle is a released API.
DX12 will also work on GPUs of multiple manufacturers without modification. Mantle is still DOA, hence why the adoption rate is so low among devs.
The moment DX12 was announced developers knew this wouldn’t get very far and thus prefer to wait until DX12 is finalized.

Guest

AMD’s goal wasnt to have a API, but rather to get MS to make a API that wasnt losing so much performance. And in that they suceeded, as they got MS to make DX12 more low level. And even if its not as low level as Mantle, its still alot better (in terms in being low level) than DX11 was. Mission complete.

bardock5151

Mantle didn’t “force” Microsoft to do anything. DX12 was in the pipeline for quite a while.

yourma2000

Which is why it’s 2 years behind Mantle.

bardock5151

Do you realise that DX takes far more time to complete than a vendor specific API? NVIDIA has even said that they and Microsoft had begun work 4 years previous to the announcement.

yourma2000

So what you’re saying is that it takes 6 years to make changes to an already existing API yet AMD manage to build one from the ground up in less time than that? And Mantle isn’t vendor specific, it works best for AMDs GCN graphics architecture but they’ve said Nvidia and Intel can create their own Mantle drivers if they so choose when Mantle 1.0 is released. Also 4 years of talk between Microsoft, Nvidia and most likely AMD yet not one single person within ANY of those companies leaked any info or acknowledged the existence of the API onto the internet? I find that really hard to believe, especially when during the time of the apparent DX12 development there were variants of DX11 released (DX11.1/11.2), surely anything developed during that time would’ve been included into these new versions of DX11 rather than holding them back for some big DirectX overhaul package? The fact is Microsoft made a half baked announcement for a new version of DirectX when they found out about Mantle, it was that half baked that they only decided after the first announcement that the Xbone would receive DX12 too, if they had been working on it for 4 years prior then they would at least have an idea about which hardware would receive the update.

I can tell you like your nvidia, I’m sure it must feel exciting that “Microsoft have been working with nvidia for the last 4 years on DirectX 12” which is why you believe the statement to be true but it’s obvious that they lied about how long they were working on it and anyone who accepts Microsoft’s word on anything as gospel is a sad fool, how would they look if they said “yeah Mantle caught us off guard so we’re releasing a new version” doesn’t sound like they care about PC gaming does it? That’s because they don’t. The fact is Microsoft want people to buy their proprietary gaming consoles as they make more money from hardware and game sales and online services rather than from PC gamers where the games have no license fee, no proprietary Microsoft hardware such as consoles or controllers and where the online access is free, the only money they make is an operating system sale. So they neglect the progress of DirectX as much as possible without allowing OpenGL to surpass it, but now AMD came out of nowhere and messed up their “PC gaming neglence plan” so now Microsoft’s PC gaming dominance has been threatened and are now only just updating DirectX so not to lose that stranglehold, especially since AMD just submitted a load of Mantle code to the Khronos Group for the next version of OpenGL.

bardock5151

Okay it’s obvious you are all about AMD and are trying to stir up something, problem is I pick the hardware based on what’s best when I’m ready to upgrade. Right now NVIDIA has the best pick with full support of the latest additions and the exciting part is they have said more is yet to come, try and find fault in my appreciation of advancement all you want, when AMD release the new high bandwidth kit ill most definitely jump in to a new AMD card if I’m upgrading by then.

DX12 by all accounts, AMD included is a massive change from DX11. The biggest thing really isn’t better performance for PC and Xbox but for all devices running windows. They are aiming for a unified ecosystem with minimal porting effort for developers, meaning less time in development. That’s where the time has gone and lots of people tend to ignore it. It’s a much bigger project than you might be willing to admit however and I advise you to open your mind on these things a bit more if you haven’t already.

You can believe mantle is the only reason DX12 is coming and pretend official announcement’s, blogs and interviews are all made up. Doesn’t change the fact that there is more credence to DX12 being in development for as long as they have said, Microsoft has been talking about a unified approach for quite a while now and again it’s all pointing to neither party being dishonest about it.

AMD however could have been dishonest when stating that Microsoft had no intention’s to release another version of DX, then shortly there after announcing their own. Seems like AMD was trying to position it’s own API in the market before the announcement on DX12.

Evidence points to Microsoft not giving up on PC gaming just by releasing DX10 and DX11, both adding features not available to the 360 due to incompatible hardware. Those same features weren’t available on the PS3 either. The reason people believe Microsoft is responsible for stunting PC is a simple case of hate on the big bad corporation, who just so happens to have one of the three consoles available on the market and each of those consoles are not capable of supporting newer iterations of their respective base API’s. If Microsoft wasn’t a player in the console space the console market would still slow up the PC market, as Microsoft could funnel all the money in the world into improving DX all they want but it’d be a wasted venture simply because the console market is leading game sales convincingly. Developers decide what API suits there needs and despite better PC hardware consoles will always control the industry’s direction regardless of if Xbox was here or not.

yourma2000

I don’t want to talk about Mantle but you can’t help it when talking about DX12, I’m focusing more on Microsoft’s incompetence and deception to consumers yet again. You can even tell their decision to announce DX12 with Nvidia was for spite over Mantle as if to say “Well you’re doing your thing so we’ll play with Nvidia” and what annoys me is that Nvidia are willing to play along with them for that status of being very close in the DX12 development. And if you need a timeline of Microsoft’s lack of effort towards the PC gaming market then here it is:

Only if you take their statements at face value and then blindly believe any random extrapolations random “tech journalists” made themselves when they wrote articles about it.

Nvidia and Microsoft’s “work” from 4 years ago was nothing more than talks and ideas, nothing concrete. If they’d really began development back then, the API (DX12) would’ve been released by now. The actual reason DX12 won’t even be here until late 2015 is because they didn’t begin actual development on it until last year or so.

I’m sure if DX12 had any real progress done on it, people would’ve known about it. Instead, many people in the industry were expressing their doubts that there would even BE a successor to DX11 any time soon prior to the Mantle public announcement and subsequent “sudden” announcement of DX12.

Dirkster_Dude

It isn’t a matter of being out or not but how easy it is to use or not use and if anyone who wants one can purchase a license if necessary. If Mantle wants widespread adoption they will need to license regardless of competition otherwise developers risk a fractured market and that is already a problem with the PC. To many options. This is why consoles have done so well and games appear first on them. In that situation they will stick with DX12, which any developer can use.

That’s cause gamebryo is awful and will never reach that level of visuals.

monstercameron

AMD’s R.Huddy has pointed out that there are more mantle games than there were dx11 games when it was first released, so the adoption rate is actually decent.

d0x360

I’d like to hope mantle has more rendering improvenents than dx12 since the primary focus of dx12 is on CPU multithreading improvements and mantle slants towards the GPU.

Aldo gamebryo is NOT under rated. I don’t care how many interviews they give you. Gamebryo is by far the worst modern engine there is. It is incredibly bad. Its the buggiest game engine, the ugliest and the worst performing…its bad.

Mark

Lemme ask u something. Gamebryo’s basically adopting Mantle into its engine for (I suppose multiplat games) for X1 and PS4? So both systems will actually use Mantle, for the games that use Gamebryo? Might sound stupid but tryin to make some sense here.

Diselt

Mantle is mostly for PC, it will make porting *from* consoles (X1 and PS4) to PC much easier and more efficient, but the consoles will use their own pre-existing low-level API’s instead. It’s also worth noting that MS’s API for the X1 is crap compared to the PS4’s, but still.

Mark

Yeah but look; “Mantle enables us to share many rendering code for Xbox One and PS4”. And; “Mantle is definitely the key technology that we’d like to adopt for consoles and high-end PCs”. I think he’s saying they’ll be using Mantle for their middleware (GameBryo) and it’ll have an impact there, then ship GameBryo to studios who use it for console and PC. That’s how I read it.

Diselt

Despite the hype though, AMD Mantle has seen a fairly slow adoption rate.

Mantle has seen faster adoption than DirectX 11 did when it debuted. Not sure how you came to this conclusion.